Sale of the Week: Moskow’s Retreat — Winnetka

List Price: $2.195 millionSale Price: $1.8 millionThe Property: This handsome Georgian with 14 rooms stands on a lush two thirds of an acre on Sheridan Road in Winnetka. Michael Moskow, who was the president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago until retiring in 2007, owned the house for 32 years before selling it…

By Dennis Rodkin

Published June 22, 2009

Michael Moskow vividly recalls the price he paid for the house in 1977—$235,000.

List Price: $2.195 millionSale Price: $1.8 millionThe Property: This handsome Georgian with 14 rooms stands on a lush two thirds of an acre on Sheridan Road in Winnetka. Michael Moskow, who was the president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago until retiring in 2007, owned the house for 32 years before selling it June 4th.

Built in 1920, the house is a study in symmetry, from the twin dormers on the roof to the matching pairs of upper-and-lower enclosed porches at the ends of the house. In the days before air conditioning, the big multi-pane doors and windows on those porches would have been thrown open on sultry summer days to catch the cool breezes from Lake Michigan just across the street.

The house has five bedrooms, big formal rooms (which include a library), an office off the master bedroom, and a cozy sitting room tucked into the top floor along with the fifth bedroom. Moskow says that the kitchen was renovated twice and the master bath three times during his tenure there; he also had a family room added to the back of the house.

Moskow and his first wife, Connie, bought the house when he moved from a government job in Washington, D.C., to a job with the steel company Esmark in Chicago. “[The house] was a step up for us,” he says, “but prices here were lower than in Washington.” In subsequent years, Moskow worked for other companies here before President George H. W. Bush appointed him Deputy United States Trade Representative, which gave him the rank of ambassador. He later became the eighth president of the Chicago Fed; he is now the vice chairman and senior fellow on the global economy at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

Connie Moskow died in 2005, when the couple’s three children were grown. In early 2008, Moskow married Suzanne Kopp, who works for the University of Chicago Medical Center. County records show that in August, they paid $2.92 million for a condo in a Gold Coast high-rise, which Moskow says makes “getting to the office easier for both of us.”
The buyers of the house are not yet identified in public records.

Price Points: Moskow vividly recalls the price he paid for the house in 1977—$235,000, the equivalent of paying about $849,000 today. With the addition and the successive renovations, he says that he had more invested in the house than he ultimately got out of it. “You don’t buy a house like that for an investment,” he points out. “It’s where you want to live and bring up your family.”